CDW hails UK arm for $75m referral boom

Net profit for the group up 16 per cent annually in Q4

CDW's CEO Thomas Richards has praised the firm's UK arm on a call outlining its Q4 results, claiming that over the full year, it generated more than $75m in customer spend from its US and UK arms referring business to each other.

For the three months ending 31 December, net profit at CDW rose 15.6 per cent annually to $103.2m (£82.56m) on sales which over the same period rose 2.2 per cent to $3.5bn.

For the full year, net profits rose 5.3 per cent to $424.4m, while over the same period, sales jumped 7.6 per cent to $14bn.

Over the 12-month period, CDW hit three "key milestones": it smashed the $1.5bn barrier in terms of customer workloads delivered via the cloud; surpassed $1bn in customer spend on security solutions; and generated more than $75m in customer spend from US-UK referrals - something Richards described as "only just the beginning".

The UK arm of CDW was called out a number of times on the earnings call, which was transcribed by Seeking Alpha.

Richards said the UK subsidiary grew in the "high single digits" in local currency for the whole of 2016, but added no further details on its performance.

"Both of our international organisations [Canada and the UK] had great fourth quarters," he said on the call. "And I don't know… [if] it's anything more than just focus and execution. I think in the case of the UK, the further we got away from the reality of Brexit and people understood kind of the longer-term play, it enabled people to get back to focusing on their companies, their businesses, and we clearly capitalised on that.

"I think there's benefit from the ongoing integration of CDW UK into CDW, benefiting from some of the things that this company has kind of used to continue to outperform the market, but you can't deny they had a great finish to the year. I'm just really proud of that team."